Re: [RFC 00/14] Port to Guile 3.0

["Jose E. Marchesi" <jemarch@gnu.org>]

Hi Tom.

> I tried re-running cgen this week and was surprised to find it didn't
> work with any version of Guile that I had available.  Apparently it
> works with the long-since-obsolete Guile 1.8, and nothing newer.
>
> This series is my attempt at a port, with random other cleanups mixed
> in.

Thank you so much for doing this.  It is a very welcome change.  It
sucks to install guile 1.8 locally in order to use CGEN.

> Note that Guile 2.x also doesn't really seem to work -- it was very
> slow and never completed.  I got impatient, so I'm not sure if it
> would have eventually, or if there is some bug.
>
> I didn't try Guile 1.8 but I would assume it no longer works after
> this series.

I don't think that is a problem.

Guile 3.0 was released more than three years ago, it is available in
Fedora 35 and later, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Guix, NixPkg stable, Mageia, SUSE
Tumbleweed, Parabola, Slackware current, Ubuntu 20 or later, Debian
stable.

> The Guile compiler cannot be used due to the loading approach taken in
> cgen.  This can be fixed but it is a somewhat larger effort, either
> involving real modules or the use of the slib require/provide system.
>
> Another possible change would be removing cos.scm in favor of Guile's
> built-in object system.  Patch #10 is basically a hack to work around
> a problem with the custom object system.  It can probably be fixed in
> a better way, but I didn't bother.
>
> I rebuilt all the cgen code in binutils-gdb with this patch after
> Alan's recent regeneration, and verified there are no changes.
>
> Tom